“Quite.” Lacey looked at her as if the mere mention of money were vulgar.
“Was Mr. Clough alone while he was here?”
“Mr. Clough, as usual, came with his personal assistant and a small group of colleagues. The season is very much a social event.”
“His personal assistant?”
“A Mr. Gilbert. Jamie Gilbert.”
“Ah, yes. Of course.” Banks had told her, when she had forced his confession about the lunch with Emily, that Emily had imagined she saw Jamie Gilbert in Eastvale the Monday of the week she died. Maybe she hadn’t imagined it after all. It was also interesting that Clough had arrived in Yorkshire only a day or two before Charlie Courage’s murder and left the day of Emily’s, which meant that he had certainly been in a position to supply her with the strychnine-laced cocaine.
“Do you know what time Mr. Clough left on the tenth?” she asked.
“Not exactly. Usually our guests depart after breakfast. I’d say between nine and ten o’clock, perhaps.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me about his stay, his comings and goings?”
“I’m afraid not. I am not employed to spy on our guests.”
“Is there anyone who might be able to tell me?”
Lacey looked at his watch and curled his lip. “Mr. Ferguson, perhaps. He’s the bartender. As such, he spends far more time close to the guests in social situations. He might be able to tell you more.”
“Okay,” said Annie. “Where is he?”
“He won’t be in until later this afternoon. Around five o’clock. If you’d care to come back then…?”
“Fine.” Annie thought of asking for Ferguson’s home address and calling on him there, but decided she could wait. Banks was at lunch with someone from Trading Standards, and Annie knew that he would want to be here if she took this line of inquiry any further. She could phone him on her mobile and arrange to meet back at Scarlea at five. In the meantime she would head out to Barnard Castle and investigate a reported sighting of Emily Riddle there the afternoon before she died.
The news about Clough was exciting, though. It was the only positive lead they had on him since Gregory Manners’s fingerprints on the CD case linked him to PKF, and it was the first real lead they’d had linking Clough with Yorkshire and catching him out in a lie. Yes, Banks would certainly want to be in on this.
Banks had first met Granville Baird two years ago, when North Yorkshire Trading Standards had asked for police assistance after one of their investigators had been threatened with violence. Since then, they had worked together when their duties overlapped and had even met socially now and then for a game of darts in the Queen’s Arms. They weren’t close friends, but they were about the same age, and Granville, like Banks, was a jazz fan and a keen operagoer.
They chatted about Opera North’s season for a while, then, jumbo Yorkshire pudding on order and a pint of Theakston’s bitter in front of him, the buzz of lunchtime conversation all around, Banks lit a cigarette and asked Granville, “Know anything about pirating compact discs?”
Granville raised an eyebrow. “Does that mean you’re in the market for something? The ‘Ring’ cycle, perhaps?”
“No. Though now you come to mention it, I wouldn’t mind the complete Duke Ellington centenary set, all twenty-four, if you can run some off for me.”
“Wish I could afford it. Does this mean that the police are actually looking at doing something about pirating at last?”
“Apart from copyright infringement, which is hardly a police matter, I wasn’t aware that any laws were being broken. If you expect us to come charging in to Bill Gates’s rescue every time someone pirates a copy of Windows, then you’ve got a very funny idea of what our job really is.”
Granville laughed. “You’re behind the times, Alan. It’s big business these days. If it were simply a matter of copying Windows or the latest Michael Jackson CD for a friend, nobody would bat an eyelid, but we’re talking big operations here. Big money, too.”
“That’s exactly what I’m interested in,” said Banks. “How big?”
“The last raid we carried out we netted about a quarter of a million quid’s worth of stuff.”
Banks whistled. “That big?”
“Tip of the iceberg.”
“So it would be a lucrative business for organized crime, would it?”
“Especially as you lot don’t even seem to think it’s a crime.”
“Point taken. Look, we’ve got a case on right now – it started with a murder – and I’ve been putting two and two together and coming up with a pirating business. I don’t know how big yet. In fact, we don’t know much at all.” Brian’s CD had been the final piece in the puzzle. Seeing its amateurishly produced cover, Banks had thought of the CD case Annie had found at PKF, the CDs she saw at Alex and Carly’s flat, about Gregory Manners’s fingerprints, Barry Clough’s dismissal as a roadie for bootlegging live recordings, and the van worth hijacking, the driver worth killing. They still hadn’t found the van’s contents yet, but Banks would bet a pound to a penny they consisted of equipment for copying CDs, along with any stock and blank discs that happened to have been there. What Banks needed to know from Granville Baird was whether there was enough profit in the pirating business to make it of interest to Clough, the way smuggling was.
“What
“A phony company leases small units in rural business parks, operates for a while, then moves on. Make any sense?”
Granville nodded. “I’ve heard rumors of such a setup, yes. And if you had two or three of these operations running at once, around the country, you could be turning over a mill or two a year or more, easy. If you had the proper equipment, of course.”
“Definitely worth his while, then?”
“Whose while?”
“We’re not sure yet. This is just speculation. What sort of things would they pirate?”
“Everything they can get their dirty little hands on. Music, software programs, games, you name it. For the moment, by far the biggest profits are in games. Sony PlayStation stuff, that sort of thing. Everyone’s kid wants the latest computer game, right? We’ve even found pirated stuff on sale that isn’t on the market yet. Some of the
“What about pirated movies?”
“There’s a lot of that, but most of it’s done in the Far East.”
“How do they get the originals? Insiders?”
“Mostly, yes. As far as the movies are concerned, though, sometimes all they have for a master is a hand-held video of the film being shown at a theater full of people. I’ve seen some of the stuff and it’s awful. When it comes to the computer programs and games, though, it’s easy enough for some employee to sneak a disc out, and if he can make a couple of hundred quid from it, all the better. There even used to be a private Web site where, for a membership fee, you got offered a variety of pirated stuff to download, but that’s defunct. Mind you, it’s very much a matter of caveat emptor. Some of it’s a rip-off. We found a lot of games among the last haul that couldn’t be played without complicated bypasses of internal security systems.”
“The manufacturers are wising up, then?”
“Slowly.”
Their food came, and they paused awhile to eat. Banks took a bite of his Yorkshire pudding filled with roast beef and gravy and washed it down with some beer. He looked at Granville, who was drinking mineral water and nibbling at a salad. “What’s up? On a diet?”
Granville frowned. “Annual checkup last month. Doc says my cholesterol’s too high, so I’ve got to cut out booze and fatty foods.”
Banks was surprised. Granville looked healthy enough, played squash and was hardly any heavier than Banks was. “Sorry to hear that.”
“No sweat. You just go right on enjoying yourself until it’s your turn.”
Banks, who felt he had led a charmed life healthwise thus far, despite the bad diet, the cigarettes and the ale,
